Posts archived in Food & Veganism
Pose picture to not make a text only post… I am studying for my last exam before summer, and am too busy to write much here. It is due tomorrow and then I have summer vacation to some extent (have to study some maths). I just wanted to say that I just discovered Djurens Rätt’s list of pretty much all vegan food available in regular grocery stores, that it is very useful, and that you can find it here.
A while back I mentioned that the only no cheese pesto around in “normal” grocery stores costs like 45 kr. Today Frej got the idea that we should finally make our own instead which we have been talking about from time to time. We just looked at the things the non-vegan pestos belonging to the other people in this household contained, and went by what we remembered from the vegan bell pepper pesto (which has neither cheese nor nuts in it so I am not sure why they’re calling it a pesto really?) and made up a recipe that turned out really delicious!
1 yellow bell pepper
3 cloves of garlic
Almost one dl of rape seed oil
A heap of capers (we used almost a whole, cheap 200g jar of them)
A lot of fresh parsley, just keep adding more until you’re pleased.
Some (just a splash) white wine vinegar
Some balsamic vinegar (same as with the other vinegar)
Then if you’ve got any available, I think you should add pine nuts or walnuts or any other nut aswell. And Frej said that he has been told that you can add a few table spoons of nutritional yeast if you want a more cheese-like flavour to it. I think that sounds absolutely delicious because I am a lover of nutritional yesat (öljäst & b-jäst) but some people absolutely hate it so be careful and don’t add too much at the same time if you’re not sure if you like it or not.
Mix it all up with a food processor or what ever it is called. Mixerstav!
Eat on hard bread with chopped up red onion. Or, like I will later today; with pasta and beans!
Outfit:
Hair rose – gift from Johanna
Vintage blouse – From Amelia a few years back
Suspender skirt – thrifted (the brand is Monki) at Röda Korset
Tights – American Apparel
Mary Janes with three straps - bought at the secondhand store Börsen on Första långgatan.
View if you’re me.
*behind the scenes* Frej was making his bed.. haha.
I actually looked like this the whole weekend through because I stayed longer than I expected at Frejs place… as often happens. On Friday I was at Radikalt Forum (my university’s socialist students seminar weekend) to listen to a seminar on Gramsci, then I went to Frej’s place. Saturday I went back to the forum and listened to a few more lectures, one was about the book the Spirit Level and was very interesting, bought Arturo Bareas biography and a book on the spanish civil war, then I went to Pop Boutique’s one year celebration with Johanna & Anton and where Frej later joined up.
Here’s a (sorta annoying) little short film I found on the book the Spirit Level, when I was googling. But yeah.. see it anyway! Then borrow the book, or something. I don’t think I will read it because I got the most of what’s in it from the seminar and might just use it for references once in a while…
Sunday Frej and I watched a few documentarys and made our own pizza.
This one was mine! Ooh so gooood, I want it back again! I think it might have been the most tasty pizza I have ever eaten. I will make it again with vegan cheese some day, then I might die with joy. It contained:
Crushed tomatoes mixed with oregano, chili and garlic.
Asparagus, mushroom, onion, falafels (which was what made it so great) and spinach.
Wish I had taken a picture after it had been in the oven, but I ate it instead.
And then there were the documentaries we watched.
First this one, Flow – for the Love of Water.
After watching this I take back that I don’t think that the Story of Bottled water which I mentioned earlier is that important in correlation to other dietary consumption issues, I didn’t know it (bottled water industry that is) was that bad in other countries,… Kinda spoiled being from Sweden which has relatively very clean water. The film is of course about more than just bottled water and very informative and easy to understand if you’re not into the subject. You can stream the entire documentary here on Documentary Wire.
And then we finally watched Capitalism – a love story.
Can’t give you tips on streaming it anywhere.
Trailer.
I thought it was pretty good too, leaves a few loose endds, wish he would have brought up more of what this has done to developing countries and how the IMF and World Bank have acted with their structural adjustment programs… and I get kinda bothered with the confrontativeness as that always make me really anxious as a person. But yeah it’s an important documentary to see anyway, and then see others on similar subjects.
Ok now I’m gonna go drink tea and love myself for getting the best grade in my course in “the origins of the modern world order” which I finally got my grade in today after nervous waiting… I’ve started sneak in to my global development studies courses aswell again today, haven’t been with them since that course ended four weeks ago… I think I am becoming a total information junkie… I wished again that I could take those courses aswell as the ones I am taking now but you’re not even allowed to be signed up to that many courses at the same time and I don’t think I could do that and keep sane either for that matter.
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There are tons of vegan waffle recipes out there and I’ve stuck to this one as long as I can remember so maybe there are even better ones but this one does equal delicious waffles! Good things with this recipe is also that you almost always have the ingredients available at home since you can switch oath milk for just oaths and water if you mix the batter with an electrical mixer or something, that the oil can be exchanged for other oils, or 100 grams of vegetable margarine and that you don’t have to buy NoEgg which is kinda hard to find!
5 dl oath milk
4 dl flour
1 dl rapeseed oil
2 teaspoons of baking powder
sugar
salt
Eat with raspberry jam, blueberry jam, tofuline icecream, ajvar, avocadoes mixed with coconut milk, nyponmarmelad (don’t know english name) avocado chocolate mousse…. or other things! What are your favourite things to put on waffles & pancakes?
Feed everyone with it!!
Julia on Waffle day last year! With ajvar and the avocado/coconut milk mix. Don’t think you have Waffle day outside of Sweden. 25th of March!
The fast which was three full days, from Monday to Wednesday went very well, or at least I never felt bad or hungry even. Drank a bit of carrot juice, oath milk and such but mostly water and herbal teas. It was interesting and I think I’ll do it again more properly & longer. Not sure if my body has now been cleansed (feeling like a hippie typing that) or if it’s imagination, but as part of my alcohol free month it felt proper and well, interesting which was my goal of doing it. I like to know how my reaction to things like this are. I did feel very energetic at some points and a bit strange and asocial at other times. Ate again today for the first time and it made me very sleepy. The wok I that made me so sleepy was also sooo tasty!!
Frej is keeping it up for two more days. If you want to fast after having read this, don’t take my word for anything & read up on it properly, ok?
Generally, though I wasn’t hungry I was really bored when not allowed to eat. Eating is one of my favourite things ever!!! ! Thought of this fact when I read Terre’s blog… This is me, only not with coffee primarily but with tea and pretty much all other food things! Livsnjutare!! Food is the best! I now feel I appreciate it even more because I have thought of it quite a lot duing these days, the ritual of eating is fab.
Here’s an illustration/collage that Becka sent me ages ago and that I’ve been meaning to scan but never gotten around to! It’s us having tea and listeing to my favourite line in Oh My Lord with Nick Cave! (Link to Spotify, listen! It’s a wonderful song) It was part of our little project to send eachother illustrations once a month to try and stay creative but that kind of died again after her having made this & I making a portrait of her. We’re now supposed to look up a word in a dictionary and draw something from that. But neither of us has initiated anything in forever… At least we kept it up for one month! Maybe we’ll succeed with doing it once a year, then there’s still time left for the new creativity to come back haha!
Today Frej and I have started the fasting, will do three days to try it out, one week seemed a bit too scary for me. At least I will, maybe he will keep it up longer, I’m not sure what his plans are. So far it’s going good! (But that’s partially because I slept so long that I haven’t even gotten hungry yet, it’s just half past two in the afternoon and I’ve been awake for like three hours.) I’m not sure how much I will write about it here, maybe a lot, maybe not much at all. Because 1) I don’t know if anyone is interested and 2) I wouldn’t want to inspire any kind of unhealthyness or experimenting that might be bad for someone. I *think* I’ve read up on it enough, but that’s enough for me to subject myself to it, not for me to try and make someone else do it aswell.
This is something I am doing because I find it really interesting and suitable with my alcohol free month and definitely not to lose weight. And you don’t lose any weight from it in the long run either so yeah…
To keep myself from thinking too much about food my plans are to read and create a lot (or a bit more than usual anyway) so if you have any inspiring sites I’d love to look at them! Could be art or sewing, or just interesting facts or history or whatever! Things that keep your mind alert anyhow.
Åsa gave me this bread the other day as a reward because I cleaned her apartment (yes I am that nice! Or, she needed it and she also provided me with wine). She works at Alvar&Ivar which is the best bakery in all of Göteborg and that’s where the bread is from aswell. They make sourdough bread, vegan, ecological & fantastically good. (I don’t even usually like bread that much at all so me thinking that a bread is fantastical is very rare!) If you’re ever in Gothenburg, you should go there!! Keep Åsa baking!!
Click the picture for a larger map.
With the exception of like half a box of After Eight on New Years eve because I really felt like stuffing myself, abunch of pieces of christmas toffees and two semlas the other day, I haven’t eaten sugar since mid August. When you don’t eat sugar it takes like a week or two before the want for it goes away. After that you never really feel like having it at all and do not miss it. At least that’s what it’s been like for me. So it’s an easy habit to break really, if you can just stand the urge for the first couple of weeks.
The hard parts so far have been pretty much none, I’d say. I have not been super purist and refused sugars in foods, and of course I eat fruit sugars so it’s not hard socially (definitely harder than being vegan though! people are pushier about wanting you to eat sugar from my experience. And swedish fika is so social, way more social than animal consumption)
An interesting thing is that what used to not taste like sugar, such as smoothies, start to taste really fantastical when your taste buds aren’t numbed by ordinary sugar all the time. And another good thing is that you never ever miss it once it’s out of your system, the times I have eaten sugar in the past after quitting have only been after social pushing, not because I couldn’t resist the sugar urge.
How to not eat sugar:
1. Decide you don’t want it.
2. When you feel like sugar make a smoothie with berries, soy milk & banana instead.
3. Stick to it (haha, easy to say) Don’t cheat too often or you’ll get hooked. (though cheat sometimes or life’d be boring)
Rowan Berry Marmalade (dvs rönnbär!)
1 litre of rowan berries
2 grapefruits (I used blood grape)
2 lemons
10 dl of water (though I used about 5-6 in the end I think)
14 dl of sugar (I used 13 dl of white sugar and 1 dl of brown ecological sugar, this was because we were all out of sugar, all stores were closed because it was Sunday. Bought a package at the candy store next to me for 26 kr in desperation. Otherwise my plan was to use way more natural brown sugar instead of the refined.)
Found the recipe here!
Pick rowan berries, rinse them in water and put in the freezer for some hours to a day. This is supposedly making them less sour.
Then take the berries, peel the the grapes and the lemon, cut what’s left in to pieces and put it in with the berries. Boil on low heat for about 45 minutes. Put the sugar in and boil hard for another 15-20 minutes. Remove the foam, put in jars, done!
I think it was great! I love that it’s not as sugary tasting as regular marmalade that I haven’t really ever been very fond of. Still, it does contain a lot of refined sugar but no chemicals which I always consider a big plus!
Some other things I learned with a quick search on the internet that you can do with rowan berries: dry them and put in bread, dry them or freeze and eat a couple a day to get vitamin c, make a juice to drink with your food, and plenty of forms of ancient magic.
A lot of people on forums and stuff also claim that they have not had as many colds since they have started eating 1-4 dried berries/day
As I mentioned before Frej and I are makng wine from the apples we picked. It’s pretty easy to make wine, we’ve made a beet wine before. (Which was terrible, by the way, but that was because we didn’t let it brew long enough because we wanted to bring it to the Roskilde festival) But my friends have made really good wine before, from juice or from fruit. Also it is of course way cheaper than to buy in stores, you can make up your own recipes and use things you find in nature so that nothing has to be transported from the other side of the world. In Sweden you can make as much wine as you want for yourself, as long as you don’t sell it. I don’t know what the laws are on that abroad.
Rowan berries and apples, We’re using a recipe that called for 14 kgs of apples and 1 kg of rowan berries + 6 kg of sugar I think.
It’s going to brew for three weeks this time, I’ll let you know if the reesult was good, haha.
Lily of the Valley
